Baby Belly

Momma asked for pictures, so here they are. Sarah took this one the end of January and then the next one (red shirt) was taken on Gammy's birthday, Feb.26th, while I was 13 weeks pregnant.

2nd ever Valentine's Day with snow

Snow on Valentine's Day is significant to our family. It all started with three and a half year old, Sarah, back in October 2004 when we were living in Dallas, TX. She told us she really wanted it to snow. We told her to ask God for snow because we couldn't make it snow. Our neighbors and friends found out she was praying for snow and laughed telling her it never snows in Dallas. Sarah kept praying. Months passed and she kept asking God for snow. It wasn't until we woke up on Valentine's Day 2005 and saw a few inches of snow covering our apartment complex's yard that we knew God said, "Yes," to Sarah's prayers. How loved we ALL felt by God!


This year Charlie had prayed with all of us asking God for some more snow. We had had some beautiful snow in the weeks past, but we were missing seeing white. A few days after his prayer, we woke up and there was a beautiful snow covering our yard once again...Valentine's Day 2010. We all rejoiced together about this answered prayer.

Valentine's Day 2010

Our family's Valentine's Day tradition for the last seven years has been to dip fruit and pretzels into chocolate. The kids absolutely love it, and we all look forward to this annual tradition. This year we not only did the "standard" dipping, but Charlie had the great idea to dip peanut butter Girl Scout cookies, too. Then, we moved on to pretzels into peanut butter before the chocolate. Yum! Yum!

The other Valentine's Day tradition is to make breakfast pink! This was something fun my mom did for Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day. We'd have colored milk and breakfast foods to match the holiday. We always loved being grossed out by the pink or green milk. Our kids have enjoyed the tradition, as well. This year the pink pancakes had cheerfully colored sprinkles also. Really healthy meal I served between all the food coloring and sugar!! Oh well. :)

The past few years I've been leaving a "trail" for the kids to follow from their room to the dining table. Last year the trail was made from tiny pink, white and red paper hearts but this year's trail was edible...red, chocolate covered (dried) cherries leading downstairs to the table. Silly.

Freckley Faces

Freckles on all!

Happy Athletes!

The kids have enjoyed the Upward Sports program through our church. Fletcher is currently finishing up the basketball season while the girls complete their first time cheerleading. All three love their once a week practices and Saturday morning games. We've had tons of fun watching and cheering for them!

Fletcher's 7th birthday (7 really?!?!?!)

Fletchman had a warrior bday theme inviting his 10 buddies to bring nerf guns to battle each other during the Friday night party. HIs guests arrived and the first activity was for each of them to create a shield using the cardboard cutouts we did ahead of time and blue, red and silver duct tape. FUN! FUN! The boys (and girls!) had a ball making their signature designs and shield logos. We divided the kids into two groups, a red team and a blue team, in order to battle each other in five different tournaments. They had a water grenade launching tournament in which they used a JUMBO sized slingshot to fling water balloons as far as they could trying to get them over our back fence into the street beyond. They had a punch balloon contest in which they battled it out with punch balloons to the head. They were allowed to use their trusty shields to guard their heads from their opponents' blows. They had a paper airplane battle in which they tried to peg each other with the paper planes to "kill" their opponent by hitting him on the head. They weren't allowed to continue using the part of the body that the plane hit. They also had a relay race on the gi-nor-mous ramp/slide we inherited after the students' New Year's Eve party. They had a ball! So fun!